By Jim Diamond

Storylines were abundant in Friday night’s season opener for the Nashville Predators.

The first game of the season, sure.

P.K. Subban’s first game as a Predator, no doubt.

A win over the Central Division Blackhawks in a tightly-played one-goal game? Absolutely.

The power play firing on all cylinders. Yes.

But tonight, I am writing about a photo, and a slightly out of focus one at that.

Shooting from a photo hole in the Predators defensive zone in the second period, I had a good angle of Roman Josi carrying the puck up ice, so I started firing the camera. I thought I had some good shots, but when I ran back upstairs to edit, I noticed the photos were a little out of focus.

Taking hockey pictures can be extremely frustrating. With the speed of the game, locking in tack-sharp focus can be difficult. You throw out a whole lot more than you keep.

Getting ready to dump that series of shots into the laptop’s trash, something caught my eye. There, just above the Pedigree dasherboard advertisement, focusing intently on the action on the ice.

You can’t trash a photo like that, even if the hard to take a bad picture of Roman Josi is a little blurry. A photobomb like that is just too good not to share.

So, I threw it out on Twitter and my mentions, well, they were flying fast and furious for the remainder of the game.

Not wanting to miss an opportunity to find out who this dog, and oh yeah his owner, is, I ran downstairs to the 100 level.

At the under 6:00 media timeout of the third period, I made my move. Media timeouts in hockey are just 90 seconds in length, so not wanting to disturb the fans in the high priced seats near the glass while the action was going on, I had to work fast. In a one-goal game between the Predators and the Blackhawks, tensions can run high.

After introducing myself as a writer and a photographer, I told the surprised gentleman that I captured an interesting shot of his quadruped and asked if I could have his permission to use the photo in a post. He was more than happy to allow it. The owner’s name is Josh Ray, and his furry friend is an adorable Yellow Labrador Retriever named Annie. In addition to being cute, Annie is Ray’s service dog.

The game was Annie’s first hockey contest, and Ray said that she handled the noise and excitement like a champ. Service dogs are trained to handle all kinds of different circumstances, and with more than 17,000 yelling fans, loud music, and goal horns Annie just took it all in stride.

And since my mom’s name is Annie, well that just makes this story even more awesome because my mom is the coolest person I know.

Oh, and conspiracy theorists, Josh and Annie were not planted there by Pedigree, it was just a crazy coincidence.